It’s hard to imagine anyone really knowing a football coach. Not even a twin. They are not the same as you and me. They have crawled out of a rare gene pool. For all we know, their DNA may be a triple helix.

But we do know one thing about them: Coaches coach, that’s what they do. It consumes them. And as we speak, Norv Turner has no one to coach. Larry King has seven more ex-mothers-in-law than players Turner has to teach.

The Chargers head coach, as with the 31 other NFL captains, is on the inside of a player lockout. He isn’t allowed to converse with an athlete, not so much as discuss the weather, let alone a playbook. It’s like teaching English lit and banning your students from reading anything.

But, what, Norv worry? He’s been around The League too long to be consumed by labor strife. When he has people to coach, he will coach them. Sitting with him in his office Monday morning at Chargers Park, all seemed normal. Rhinos have thinner skin than Norv Turner. He’s going about his business as though it were any other March.

“Up until May, I really don’t think things will be much different than what we do normally,” he was saying. “Coaches are involved in the draft (at the end of April), but we don’t have a major role. At this time of year, as always, we’re looking at ourselves, looking at ways to get better. That hasn’t changed.

“This time of year, we don’t have much interaction with players. It will be a lot different if it’s like this in May. If nothing’s done by May, it obviously could be a lot different. Maybe I’m dating myself, but there are guys like me still around who coached when there were just three-day mini-camps and no offseason programs. There’s less reason to panic than if this were to happen in May and June.”

But what if this labor thing drags beyond May and June? Some people think it could go into August and September. Maybe the courts will rule the lockout isn’t legal, which would change things. All I know is that, the longer a fishing boat is tied to a pier, the less money it makes. The longer labor negotiators don’t negotiate, the longer the standoff.

Turner certainly has fewer problems than newly hired coaches, who have no one to teach their systems to. But not everything the Chargers intend to do this year can be pulled out of an old hat.

“We would go through it a bit with Rich (Bisaccia) coming in to coach special teams and Greg (Manusky) taking over the defense, although he has been in our system, and a lot of the terminology will be the same,” Turner said. “But, if you’re a team bringing in brand new offensive and defensive coaches, you’re hoping this gets settled sooner than later.

“We have a new special teams coach, different personality, different system. We all try to do too much. In this case, less could be better. So, you’d better be ready to streamline what you’re doing, because there may not be a lot of time to waste.”